Changelog: New group filtering + interactive Playground

TL;DR

• What's new? Talo now has a new events filter, group stat values and leaderboard scores and the ability to update game names.
• What's changed? We've made improvements to player merging, player alias tracking, email validation and group dev data filtering.

November 2024 overview

This month we spent more time extending player group functionality and improving the Talo Playground in both the Godot plugin and Unity package. We also spent a lot of time on improving the user experience of Talo. Here’s what we’ve rolled out this month:

Dashboard updates

• Events filter: The events overview now has a new filter allowing you to easily select, deselect and find the events you want to see.

• Group stat values and leaderboard scores: You can now add criteria centred around leaderboard scores and game stat values to your player groups. This opens up new possibilities for finding the best (and worst) players in your game.

• Updating game names: Game names can now be easily updated from your organisation page.

Backend updates

• Safer player merging: We've made improvements to ensure player merging is more reliable and isn't prone to race conditions.
• Player alias last seen: Talo now tracks when a player alias was last active, helping you understand player engagement better. This is also now surfaced in the dashboard within player profiles.
• Player authentication email validation: Talo now takes care of email validation for you. Players will now need to enter a valid email address when enabling verification for their account.
• Group dev data: Group membership values now correctly filter out dev data when it isn't enabled.

Docker updates

• arm64 support: We've started to build our Docker images for arm64, allowing Talo to run natively on other platforms like newer Raspberry Pi models.

Godot plugin updates

• Interactive playground: The Playground is now much more interactive, requiring you to fill in your own values for most examples. We made this change to improve the new user experience and help developers understand how to use Talo within the context of their game. We've also added additional error messages and guidance across the Playground to help you get started.

Unity package updates

• Unity 6 compatibility: Full support for Unity 6 is here! We’ve ensured that all Talo features are compatible with the latest Unity release.
• Interactive playground: Similar to the Godot plugin, we've made the Unity Playground more interactive to give new developers a better experience.

Showcase: explore games made with Talo

Our new showcase page highlights the games being made by developers in our community. If you’re using Talo in your game, we’d love to hear from you and learn more about how you're using Talo. Check out the GitHub repository for more information on how to submit your game.

What’s next?

Looking forward to December, we’re planning to release new socket-based functionality for Talo in the form of Channels. Channels will allow you to send messages to groups of players in real-time. This is our first step towards more real-time functionality and we're spending plenty of time building infrastructure that's easy to manage, scale and self-host.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. Join us on Discord and be part of the Talo journey!